Varla Jean Merman lights up the Provincetown Art House

Thursday

Aug 14, 2014 at 11:00 AMAug 14, 2014 at 11:45 AM

Varla Jean Merman is a superhero. Jeffery Roberson, the man behind the legend, can do it all. He can play a woman, a man or a giant banana when called for. His Varla should have her own comic character with dolls and T-shirts and the whole shebang. Whether she's licking a jar of mayonnaise in her one-woman show, “Relieving Herself,” or floating around the stage as the over-sexed Blanche in “Golden Gals,” she is always fabulous. Both are on stage all season long at the Art House in Provincetown.

By Lynda Sturner

Jeffery Roberson, the man behind the legend, can do it all. He can play a woman, a man or a giant banana when called for.

His Varla should have her own comic character with dolls and T-shirts and the whole shebang. Whether she’s licking a jar of mayonnaise in her one-woman show, “Relieving Herself,” or floating around the stage as the over-sexed Blanche in “Golden Gals,” she is always fabulous. Both are on stage all season long at the Art House in Provincetown.

As Merman, Roberson proves he’s a master of physical comedy, a chanteuse with a two-octave range and a clown who knows how to take it over-the-top and still keep it real.

The highlight of Merman’s solo show is her rendition of “Ring Them Bells” as she transforms herself into Quasimodo and back again. The old cloak, the missing teeth and her crazy eye grin is Merman over the top and at her best.

And then, to watch Merman work with Ryan Landry and Olive Another in “Golden Gals” is to watch a master class in acting. Seeing the three pros bouncing off each other along with newcomer Brooklyn Shaffer is what theater is all about.

Merman wrote the show, based on the TV series “Golden Girls,” collaborating with her long time director, Ricky Graham. They inserted these quirky commercials and asked Ryan Landry to play Dorothy. “Of course [Landry] has great ideas so he came up with new lines. We played around with the script, made a lot of changes, and now the script has never been better,” says Merman.

But as much fun as he has playing Varla, Roberson says he wants to play more male characters. He’ll be joining the Gold Dust Orphans in New York City this fall playing Prince Charming in “Snow White & the Seven Bottoms.” He also will be playing Captain Hook in “Star Catchers” this fall in New Orleans.

Roberson first created Varla in New Orleans where he was doing drag for a video for a contest. “I read Ethel Merman’s autobiography and it says, ‘My marriage to Ernest Borgnine’ and when you turn the page it’s blank,” he says. “I started thinking about it and decided that if they had a kid she would have gotten rid of it. We did this 15-minute sketch of me being the illegitimate daughter of Ethel Merman trying to make it in show biz.”

He’s been working with her co-writer Jacques Lamarr to develop Varla’s one-woman shows since 2004. “I’ll have a couple of ideas for songs then we talk about it and from just a couple of ideas you find a theme around it and then we try to write a whole show,” he says. “Sometimes I have a great idea for a song and then I don’t know where to start. I know the beginning, middle and end but I don’t know how to put it together. Jacques helps me do this.”

Roberson says he was originally going to make Varla Jean’s “Relieving Herself” a farewell tour. He wanted to stay in hometown New Orleans and do theater. “My body has definitely changed,” he says. “It’s like Frank Sinatra when he got older. It wasn’t that he got fat — you just thicken out after you get older. My voice has deepened. It was getting hard on my voice. I had to sing in a different way.”

Instead of quitting, Roberson restructured how Varla sang and moved. And the bigger she’s gotten, the more glorious she has become. Roberson says he’s more fit now than he’s ever been. He started doing cross fit and placed 213th in the world competition in his first year.

Most drag queens stay as they are and rarely change. Let Varla Jean Merman age as we all do. Let her bring it on home.